


Riot

by RoryKurago



Series: Kurago [6]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: BuenaKai, Drift Side Effects, Gen, Original Character(s), Original Jaegers - Freeform, Psychological Trauma, Shatterdome Family, Sydney Shatterdome, Tattoos, The Drift (Pacific Rim), self-indulgent experimentation with writing style, the Kwoon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 12:49:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13458618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: "You’re narrow-minded, Dana Collier." Four days after Tahnee dies in a car accident, Dana looks up and there are strangers in step-brief.There is no sign for ‘riot’ in the sign language of Australia. Like many things tumultuous and vast, it must be taken apart.Vulcan’s crew are the youngest, and they see dead heroes as a letdown.





	Riot

**Author's Note:**

> This is alternate perspective on the end of "2017: Palau" and the start of "2018: Kodiak"  
> I've been looking forward to posting this since mid-2015 (when it was actually written, which should tell you how long I've been working on Kurago).  
> Stylistically, I adore this piece and I've never been able to replicate it. Everything just fit together so well.
> 
> Music is "Brothers On A Hotel Bed" by Deathcab For Cutie

( _You are narrow-minded, Dana Collier_.)

1.

There is no point at which Nor-Iman says this to her. That may be part of the problem.

 

2.

There are new faces at step-brief. Dana doesn’t know how long they’ve been there. How long since she looked up from the manila folder in front of her? Two days? Four?

There’s never anything written in her agenda. She plots the empty blue lines like a patrol sector. Why do they still issue her a folder?

 _Autopilot_ , murmurs a voice at the back of her head. Same reason she still musters up.

The voice sounds like Dana’s, and yet not. Her nose is scraped raw from the concrete wall beside her bunk; wrapped in blankets, the concrete against her back still feels like Tahnee’s ribs.

Four days then.

 

3.

There is no sign for ‘riot’ in the sign language of Australia. Like many things tumultuous and vast, it must be taken apart.

 

4.

They’ve been in Sydney three days. Allegedly. Time has become a fluid thing—decanted in hours and days as _Before The Accident_ and _After,_ carried around in buckets and mugs of tea and 40-galleon drums stacked at the edges of the Jaeger bay.

Right now for instance is eighty-seven hours and three minutes ATA. Dana writes that on the legal pad beside the mug she hasn’t touched: 87-03.

Doctor Patel cranes her neck around to read and asks what that means. Dana asks when her assessment of _Ranger Collier, Dana R., surviving_ , is due.

 

5.

First, you sleep too much. Then you don’t sleep. This is something nobody tells you, although they will use words like _dissociative episode_ and _fugue state_ in the same tone they used to say _co-dependency_. Blink, and the world has changed.

Blink: your co-pilot’s dead.

Blink: wet hair clings to her neck like wiring.

Blink: someone pounds on the door and it’s been thirty hours since anyone’s seen your face.

Part of you thinks that’s being greedy: her face is plastered over every TV screen and news site, and you’re practically the same. What difference does it make if it’s you or her?

Blink, and there’s a new Jaeger in Bay Four and strangers in step-brief.

 

6.

 _You’re narrow-minded, Dana Collier_. She’s keeping herself alive by blocking everything noncritical. She’s learning barcodes instead of coping mechanisms, and plotting blue lines on the agenda like patrol sectors. In her head is a buzz of static and a roar like the sea inside a shell but bigger. Loud enough to swallow a city.

There’s a word for that but she doesn’t remember what it is.

 

7.

They’re Vulcan and Specter.

No: Alastor and Nor-Iman. An English teacher based in Manila and an acrobat from Terengganu. A black Brit and a Malay. Twenty-seven and eighteen. Don’t think too hard about how any of that works. Dana’s arms are numb from carrying buckets and they’re asking why she works on deck when that’s what the crew are for. (Alastor’s asking.) They are—

Serious

Stoic

Not born fighters

Short.

In that order. They don’t look like much. Dana shrugs and dips her face into her mug.

 

8.

Vulcan Specter is bigger than Dana expected, and her tech crew is the youngest yet—mostly fresh grads seasoned with barely enough old salt to keep them grounded. They say she has a Karonida SX Fuel Cell, ReGen electrical synapses, and a pair of Prometheus forearm-mounted incendiary launchers. They say a lot of things.

Among them is to complain that Kurago still has the Kennel (Bay 3, closer to the Suit Room) when Vulcan is relegated to Bay 4—the one with malfunctioning vents.

Another is to rename Bay 4 ‘The Forge’. Everyone else calls it Hell.

The first mistake they make is calling Vulcan ‘superior to Lucky Seven’. ( _Ranged weaponry, you hillbilly fucks_. Dana finds that ironic considering half of Vulcan’s techs are from Albion Park, Ipswich, and Tasmania.)

The last mistake is calling Vulcan ‘Kurago’s replacement’.

 

9.

Nor-Iman is five-three. Dana has seven inches and twenty kilos of muscle on her. Dana has seven inches, twenty kilos, two combat deployments, point five of a second of reaction time, and fifteen years of martial arts experience on her. But Nor is five-three and she’s been dodging people her whole life for much stronger reasons than Dana.

Dana hits the mat harder than she expects to.

 

10.

“Do they call you a single now that there’s just one of you?”

Dana can’t tell what gender the tech who asks this as she leaves the Kwoon is, only that they wear Vulcan’s orange patch and the bleat they make when one of Kurago’s sparkies caves their cheek in is the same as sheep trying to escape the Dip.

Vulcan’s crew are the youngest, and they see dead heroes as a letdown.

 

11.

Time is liquid. Standing in the shower trying to scrub off your own skin like you can peel the sweat and rain from your pores uses a lot of it. But maybe if you can take _that_ back, you can take back the crash that condensed a ute to a tuning fork. You can make it so she isn’t riding alone.

Your reflection is waiting in the fogged-up mirror when you get out. Her face, your face: white and blue and red clotted in her hair, with pink water pooling in her ear, and a voice that sounds like you but not, saying: _getting kind of long, Na-na, reckon it’s time for a haircut._

Wet hair clinging to her neck. Your neck.

The clippers disintegrate on impact with the concrete wall.

 

12.

Marshal Merriman is high-strung. He flips. What is this hair? What are these fights? Is Kurago _trying_ to sabotage the image of this base?

Grief haircuts are so 2014. (So are riots.)

 

13.

There’s a tattoo on Nor-Iman’s forearm. Dana gets an up-close look at it when Nor steps in to press a _hanbo_ to her throat. Nor only uncovers her arms in the Kwoon the same way she only uncovers her hair; this is the first time Dana has seen the tattoo. It’s very familiar. It’s very distinct. It means Dana’s wrong about the fighter thing.

Nor doesn’t smile when she lifts the _hanbo_ away. Dana doesn’t take the hand she offers.

 

14.

Nobody will tell you that if you wear your memento long enough, your own smell will overwrite the original one. Your twin is fraternal and you do not smell the same. She smells like ginger, and dry grass and brackish water in the dam. You smell like—antiseptic. Cold sweats.

How long has it been since you slept without nightmares and didn’t wake up scraping the plastiHeal off your nose?

Four showers, eighteen mugs of tea, and three tanks of KBN.

One hundred and eleven hours, less nine.

Dana writes that on the legal pad: 110-51. Two more would make it the Q-Store code for the brackets that hold Kurago’s coolant piping in place. (The techs replaced twenty-six of those after her last deployment. Tahnee replaced two.)

Patel says fixation on minutiae is a side effect of grief. Dana wants to tell her it’s a side-effect of a pilot father, mechanic mother, and four fucking years of the apocalypse. The whole human race is grieving.

Instead she says,

_Minutiae like you always coming in smelling like aftershave of Vulcan’s crew chief? I don’t blame you. He seems like a bright guy._

Isn’t that a side-effect of grief too? Seeking out physical comfort? Dana’s nose stings under fresh plastiHeal.

There are no more appointments with Patel.

 

15.

110-53. 112-03. What’s the banding for those barcodes? How big are the spaces?

The drumming hollowness inside her feels like an aftermath. It isn’t clean-swept and smelling of ozone, it’s smoking shopfronts and spoiling milk on linoleum at the back of a convenience store. It’s garbage drifting in the gutters and people afraid to leave their homes.

 

16.

Alastor is holding court in the mess with a knot of LO-techs and translators and analysts: fricative consonants and the phonemic alphabet in transcribing radio chatter.

He is not a fighter. He is a scholar—who happens to be good at fighting. Nor-Iman frowns and shakes her head to something he says, but when one of the techs addresses her directly, she presses her fingers over her mouth.

 

17.

The gesture in Australian Sign Language for _twins_ is two fingers held upright at shoulder level and shaken twice.

 

18.

The tech who asked Dana if they call her a single now knocks on the door of Kurago’s office and apologises, but zher thumbs jut defiantly out from zher coverall pockets, and zhe adds that Dana’s _been_ _super-rude, Commander, to Commander Ikhane,_ and that Dana has no idea how hard other people have had it to get this far.

Which part, Dana wonders, is supposed to be easy?

Kodiak? The reduction to ideas of themselves? Or the hollow left when those ideas disintegrate?

How much of the tech’s loyalty is dependant on the existence of Nor-Iman’s tattoo, and how much on its absence? Do the crew know it’s there and sympathise—or would they feel the same as Dana if they saw it?

 

19.

The anchor-bolts that they hook the cables into to airlift Kurago to the aircraft carrier that will take her back to Hong Kong are listed as 967-483 in the Q-Store registry. The staffers who mill on the helipad to watch know better than to comment on the Ranger in their midst with patrol cap pulled low, even as her mouth mutely forms the numbers.

But a programmer with an orange patch on his sleeve slaps his buddy as she ghosts by in a corridor and says, _good riddance, ay? Get that relic out of the way and make room for some modern tech_.

The bitterest desk-jockeys have little enough respect for actual jockeys as it is. This one is mouthier than most.

 

20.

Hell is where the young and the stupid end up. How many of them were sent there by Kurago and Lucky’s crews? (How much was Vulcan’s crew saying _obsolete_ and _more bark than bite_ , and how much was Kurago’s retorting _Nalastor_?)

 

21.

Nor-Iman has a headscarf for each day of the week. They are co-ordinated with the shit-you-not _legit_ handkerchiefs Alastor totes as ascots, bandanas, and pocket squares. The one Nor-Iman wears when Merriman summons her and Alastor to his office to deal with this inter-crew gang war is mellow brown shot with gold. It smells like jasmine.

Underneath the scarves she has black hair to her shoulders, and the braided buns she pins it into are works of art. Maybe this is why she spends so much time during the meeting studying _Dana’s_ hair. The fresh lack of it. The shallow cuts near the nape where the tremors shook Dana’s hand too hard to steady.

Patrol cap shoved into her thigh pocket, Dana’s scalp is bared and there’s no way to hide. (Has she found the words to explain this to Patel yet? How many hours until she’s back in that office for the pre-funeral preptalk?) With her coveralls knotted at her waist and only a singlet beneath, the tattoo of Kurago’s decal on Dana’s right deltoid is bared too. There’s a line of blood drying across it from the hands of a munitions tech wearing Kurago’s red patch whom Dana pulled off another tech toting Vulcan’s orange. Dana’s not sure which man the blood belonged to.

Nor-Iman’s brows twitch together as Dana issues a formal apology for the staffers from her crew who took umbrage with Vulcan’s and registered their complaints in cracked teeth and bruises. The twitch doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how hollow the words come out.

(How long since you slept, Dana Collier? How many untouched mugs of tea, and drums of chems added to the old stock at the edge of the Kennel in preparation for a combat drop Kurago will never make?)

Absurd, to indulge fraternal squabbles like this in combat crews. Absurd, to foster this disunity.

Nalastor incline their heads but while Alastor says they’ll talk to their crew, Nor-Iman’s eyes linger on the red-smeared black on Dana’s shoulder.

 

22.

Alastor considers a Kwoon session the ideal way for Kurago and Vulcan’s commanders to sort out their personal discrepancies. Tomorrow?

There’s a tattoo on Nor-Iman’s arm that she covers most of the time, and it means her techs will be more fiercely loyal or less depending on whether they already know it’s part of the construct of Nor. But Dana’s not sure which.

Meantime there’s blood on the hangar floor and a roaring at the back of her mind like a dozen angry techs trying to defend a memory, or ten thousand angry people trying to save a life.

 

23.

All Vulcan’s tools go missing. This is as close to the ‘bloodless’ condition Merriman demanded as the rising tensions will come.

 

24.

How many hours did Dana sleep in the first seventy-eight?

Not enough: Kurago’s crew chief still looked at her with sad eyes and tugged at an eyebrow when Dana told her Dana didn’t care what the jobs were, just find her something to do with her hands. How long had it been?

Her days are indivisible from the time that flows through her, pushing her further adrift from her twin. There is a rage in her, building out at sea, and when it breaks it will obliterate the people protesting Tahnee’s loss.

Dana will be one of them.

The first job was cleaning filters.

_Sorry, ma’am, they’re mindless, but you won’t break anything if your attention slips._

 

25.

All Vulcan’s tools turn up suspended from a magnalift in the Kennel. This is before the rematch. After Dana has a frank, detached discussion with a tech of indeterminate gender about the righteousness of extremism, twins and dead heroes.

Merriman is enraged. _Your sister’s death is not the death of professionalism,_ he screeches. _The Ranger in you didn’t die with her._

Across the table, Nor-Iman is making notes on a legal pad while Alastor watches intently.

 

26.

Nor brings a mug of tea when she sits down opposite Dana in the mess and lifts her hands. Her wrist is purpled below the cover of her cuff, and her shoulder—

 

27.

The tattoo on Nor-Iman’s forearm is the roundel of a proto-BuenaKai group. The sort that rioted and blew up first responders. Study to survive, and stop nuking cities or we riot. BuenaPeace.

How many dead? How many mugs, tanks, of Blue in the water to save your Sisters?

We riot either way.

 

28.

Nor holds out a _hanbo_ in mute offering like a sacrifice to an altar, her arms bared to the Kwoon’s acerbic light. Her tattoo shows blacker than muck on Kurago’s filters.

Dana lands flat on her back, two points down and fading.

What would you give, Dana Collier, to have gone down in the rage of the riot with your sister beside you? Would you have killed a thousand to save a million? Would you have cared what the cost was if you could have died doing what you thought was right?

Forty-six drops. Forty-three kills on the joint record. (—R-DCOL_621.58-I | R-TCOL_680.56-H rostered to _Dingo Kurago,_ Mark-II, date of active service: December 28, 2016—)

Forty-four kills if Gallowtail counted. Forty-five if Onikuma did.

five thousand dead in Sydney trying to stop the nuking of Scissure via occupation.

Three points to come back and win the bout.

And one hundred and thirty-two point seven hours since Dana’s co-pilot died in a car crash.

 

29.

Vulcan Specter’s strength is that they strike from a distance. Dingo Kurago’s was that she closes the distance and disables from within the guard. Specter is five-three and she’s been dodging nastier people than Dana her whole life, but Dingo’s an opportunist and she’s faster.

Nor slams into the mat face-first. When she stepped in from the left, Dana threw her right leg up, twisting it over the _hanbo_ into the space between elbow and rib and locking her foot behind Nor’s skull.

Nor’s _hanbo_ cuts across Dana’s thigh as she uses her right ankle to lock Nor’s head down and thrusts her own hips up with Nor’s arm clutched lengthways to her stomach. It wouldn’t have worked on someone taller. Someone stronger, or faster, or who knew the Collier thing about armbars. But Nor is five three and her tattoo presses against Dana’s navel until Nor is shrieking gutturally and hands are pulling Dana up up up away _what the fuck Collier_ and she’d take a swing at Scott if he came close enough but he doesn’t.

Nor’s eyes glitter at her. Dana’s knuckles are split. Sweat stings in them when she goes to fingercomb her hair and grips only the two-inch scruff left of her fringe.

Nor is on her feet, waving Alastor away. He looks ready to come at Dana himself except there’s a freckled shoulder between them (do you recognise _that_ trashy tattoo?) and Scott’s beside Alastor saying _back up, mate, let the ladies sort it_.

Nor’s holding her shoulder just so, and her wrist is bloodless in the shape of Dana’s hands. There’s a sardonic twist to her lips like a smile she won’t externalise. She looks like Tahnee.

Dana thrusts away the thud of her heart and leaves the Kwoon.

 

30.

Nor brings a mug of tea when she sits down opposite Dana in the mess and lifts her hands—

 _Are there more like you?_ Dana says. _At the Academy. More like you?_

Kaiju groupies.

Nor rocks back on the bench. For a moment her shoulder goes totally slack. Her hands flutter beside the mug and then—

Their fine webbing of white and brown scars pulls taut and they lock around the mug.

She doesn’t make any motion to stop Dana standing and walking away. If Dana was her, she’d flip herself off. There’s a curl to Nor’s lip that says if she were Dana, she would too, but she doesn’t. Is that the Specter in her or the Vulcan?

 

31.

Kurago’s deck crew scrub the Kennel with degreaser and toothbrushes. All of them.

 

32.

The flight to Honolulu for the funeral leaves at 1010 the next day. Before that:

 _You’re narrow-minded, Dana Collier_. Nor doesn’t say this.

Alastor does instead, stalking along the gantries until he finds her. She’s already in her dress blues for the flight. A media feeding frenzy at the other end is inevitable, and the Corps had best put their most refined foot forward.

Refined like steel, Dana wonders, or like the curl of Nor’s lip: delicately rendered but unapologetic?

Below them Vulcan’s techs are yowling and jeering as they ferry crates from Hell to the Kennel: _thanks for cleaning it up for us,_ and a variety of gestures Dana’s half glad she doesn’t know. Is there a two-fingered gesture in there? Several.

Kurago’s crew still bear black armbands and patches over their decal. Dana’s insides convulse. Alastor stands on her left. Is it insensitivity or antagonism?

_Things aren’t as dichotomous you think._

What he means is ‘you owe her an apology’.

Dana nearly dislocated his co-pilot’s arm.

Alastor’s crew consistently disrespects Dana’s.

Does it matter that Nalastor are not their crew, or that Nor attempted what had every appearance of a truce in the mess?

How many died in Sydney because the out-going evacuation traffic was jammed up by in-going protestors? How deep is the resentment broiling under that layer of numbness that a seditioner gets to fight on with their soul intact while a good soldier flies to Honolulu in a box?

Dana walks away without responding to Alastor’s assessment.

 

33.

Then: _—waste of money training a late-game washout like Tahnee Collier_.

 

34.

Then: the Academy.

 

35.

Then: Gavrroche and _put on a good show, the US Rep is out there._

A new scar under Dana’s eye and Gavrroche’s _absolute_ conviction when he says _we’re drift-compatible_. (The smell of Cabo burning melded with imported tobacco in the cigar offered to him by an inland talent agent.)

 

36.

Dana puts in for J-Tech. She thinks, as she fills the forms, of what Alastor said. Things are not as dichotomous as you think. And he’s right—but you’re Drift-compatible or you’re not. You’re in the Corps, or you’re not. You’re dead, or you’re not.

It will be a long time before she stops grieving and the minutiae is what she uses to measure time now. There are too many hours. There might be enough washers and bolts.

 

37.

Before it’s approved, the application comes back with a photocopy of clinical notes and a green post-it note on top. The green is peaceable, a pale green picked deliberately to be soothing.

A portion of the notes is highlighted:

_—demonstrated tendency towards escapism with specific attention to mechanics and attendant engineering—_

_—refused further counselling in spite of clinical recommendation—_

The note hovers above it in Marshal Pentecost’s curt handwriting: _Do we need to talk about this?_

She’s tempted to write below it, and send the papers back via messenger but she fronts up to his office in person and waits while he finishes chewing out a pair for goofing off with Verociter. When he is done, she places the folder on his desk and slides it back to him.  
_No, Sir. We don’t._

 

38.

She’s back in coveralls and boots when Alastor finds her on the gantry overlooking the Kennel. It isn’t the Kennel anymore; it’s not Hell either. Ten months rubbing shoulders with the crews of Lucky and Nomad has rubbed off most of Vulcan’s rough edges. At least superficially.

Alastor’s eyes flick down to the techs ambling about, and then back to Dana’s face.

At his heels is Nor. Her sardonic not-smile is still in place but she walks less like she’s picking her way barefoot through burning rubble, and the strand of hair that’s escaped her headscarf curls darkly against her neck unmolested. She is not threatened—and Dana is not a threat.

Dana wonders briefly how she ought to feel about that but decides that how she feels is less important than the unfairness she dealt Nor before. She opens her mouth to apologise.

Nor cuts her off with a flap of one hand. Nor points to her own chest then makes twisting motion at her throat like a dial, points to Dana, and finishes by lifting two fingers to shoulder height and shaking them twice.

 _She’s sorry about your twin_ , Alastor says. Another set of signs. _She never said._

 

39.

The day before the funeral – the day of the fight – Dana sat in Patel’s office for a final check-in. Not a full session, just…

Dana made a note on a legal pad: 162-40. The brackets of the sprung cantilevered spars in the umbilical array to catch Kurago’s Conn.

 _What do the numbers mean, Dana?_ Patel asked.

There were a thousand different ways to lie.

 _Parts,_ Dana said, raising her eyes from the pad. _They’re parts._

 

_40._

_She never said,_ Alastor says, and Nor presses her fingertips to her mouth.

You’re a Ranger, Dana Collier. How did you miss _that_?

For the first time, she sets aside the minutiae of Nor-Iman binte Ikhane and examines the whole.

 

41.

Nor is Malaysian but she was performing in Manila. (Last of her troupe.)

She was protesting in Sydney. She is deaf from the explosion and infections. (Too many dead.)

Her hair, so long, is shorter on one side from three years growing out an asymmetrical shave. (Too much Blue into the water.)

These are not things Dana knew, but if she had paid attention, or asked, she could have learnt. These are things that she _will_ learn, in coming years, by asking Nalastor. By teasing techs and losing bets and frankly informing Alastor that they disagree on policy but they can be civil. By not being the narcissistic sociopathic profiteer she accused Gavrroche of being.

But for now: Nor-Iman is not BuenaKai.

Her tattoo is not the declaration Dana’s is. It is the reminder of all the parts of the past that make her the Ranger she is in the present.

The clenching in Dana’s chest is either shame or cardiac arrhythmia, and neither would be unexpected.

Nor signs; Alastor speaks. The words emerge in perfect time with the movements of Nor’s lips in Alastor’s mid-range baritone.

_The Sydney Riot—_

Dana watches Nor’s hands slow as she takes the word apart into fingerspelling.

_—the last time I ran with the crowd._

 

42.

You’re narrow-minded, Dana Collier. You’re blocking out everything noncritical, and it might be keeping you alive but this is not the way you were raised.

Alastor narrows his eyes but tucks his hands carefully into his pockets. _If you speak slowly,_ he says, _she can lip-read._

Where does Dana start, she wonders? By clearing the wreckage, she supposes.

She gestures awkwardly and says, _I’m sorry about your arm._

Nor makes another set of signs: rubs her chest twice flatpalmed, bounces a wrist, taps her skull with a curled knuckle, then strokes a thumb first with the other and then against her face.

_She liked your hair better before._

Back when Dana sheared it back to a scruff of fringe and time was measured in buckets and mugs of tea and tanks of chems. Back when a tech of indeterminate gender told Dana she had no idea how hard others had had it.

Dana reaches up and tugs a little wisp of fringe. Ten months on and it still hasn’t really grown back but she’s getting closer to the punk shaves of some the tech crews.

_I like it more the way it is now._

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd a LONG time ago by the ever-lovely artificiallifecreator. 
> 
> Thoughts, feelings, suggestions are all appreciated! Thanks <3


End file.
